Today, artifacts incorporating emotion prediction algorithms do not actively engage with their environment as they are disembodied and passive. We propose to question the engagement in the world of future artifacts: will they reconfigure our ways of acting and perceiving emotionally? Will they be able to feel emotions like humans? Will they develop new ways of expressing themselves? Is it possible to feel and share emotions with them?
Egon questions the possibility of interacting emotionally with an artifact. It is an embodied artifact that perceives and acts emotionally with the public. Egon incorporates the different modes of emotion expression. It evaluates its environment in real time according to its desires; the result modulates the expression of emotion components. It is capable of physiological reactions, motor expressions, action tendencies and even subjective feelings.
Egon is an artifact that learns in real time from the public reactions. While the public tries to predict Egon's behavior and emotions, it reacts in its own way. The roles of entertainer and spectator are reversed. The experience of interacting with Egon quickly creates a kind of empathy. From these co-adaptive interactions, a bond between the two parties is created.
Interacting with Egon is an opportunity to observe the genesis of a common ground between an artifact and oneself, and to investigate the possibility of an emotional bond with artifacts. The intuitive co-adaptability by which people seek a full experience of the artwork leads them unconsciously to initiate the search for understanding of others, thus emerging in what seems to be the foundations of what makes a community.
Will Egon imitate you or try to change your behavior and emotions? What new ways of interacting will emerge? Egon opens the discussion to many possible futures. Its particular status questions the emergence of new forms of artificial intelligence assistants that might look like us and interact with us, and the place they will take. It addresses the possible dynamics and ways in which we can create links between the human and the non-human.
